I had these friends, we’ll call them, Blake and Sandy, who were always mooching off my husband and I. When we went to dinner, the grocery, the farmers market, the movies, these two would just stand on the side while my hubs and I pulled-out our wallets. I figured, for sure, when they hung out with other friends, it couldn’t be like that. So why were we always expected to pick-up the tab? The situation really tore me-up, I worried…
So I will start by admitting that this short entry is less of a story or a contemplation and more of a moment — a brief flash of awareness. It must have been mid 2012. I was at the farmers market with some friends and the day was beautiful, perfect even. I was standing, with a delicious coffee in hand, looking out at a sparkling blue ocean and it hit me. The problem statement. My problem: I don’t really believe…
I would like to preface this blog by telling you upfront, you have heard it all before. It is on a theme you may have noticed already — Ideal/ Good Alana versus Normal/Bad Alana. You can see it in the prelude to this blog (Super Buddhist versus Everyday Alana), in the Homeless Alana story, In the Compassionate Alana story, spoiler alert : in an upcoming blog about mooching friends and in the last blog of this section about fearing my practice…
I show-up at the Wat one day and LP Anan tells me that he and Mae Yo were talking about me the night before (uh-oh). They noticed that I have a problem (double uh-oh), my driving need to be compassionate (wha wha what how can this be a problem? Snap triple uh-oh), and I should go and solve it (easy as pie right?). So, in sum, my assignment was to notice the way that being a ‘compassionate’ person feeds into…
Impermanence is the meat and potatoes of my practice. Though over the years my thinking (and this blog, which will soon follow that thinking) evolved to consider many more Dharma topics (self and self belonging, suffering, aggregates, karma, etc.), I always come ‘home’ to impermanence. It’s my staple food for thought. It is my constant companion. It is the Dharma, my great refuge. So here I want to offer you, Dear Reader, one more simple tool that I consider a…
It was one of my early retreats, 2012 perhaps, and Mae Yo started playing a game some of you ‘old timers’ might know: How are those birds related? The set-up is simple; imagine you look up and see 2 birds flying in the sky. Explain how they are related. I heard this and I thought, “this is sorta idiotic”. I mean who cares how the birds are related? Sure, sure I know the punch-line before we even start the game…
Another Prelude to Introduce A Super Duper Important Buddhist Concept — Two-Sidedness: This next 2 section will have lots of entries on two sidedness so this seems as good a time as any to offer an introduction to one of the most fundamental ideas in Buddhism — Everything, everything, EVERYTHING, has 2 sides. 2 sidedness is a feature of impermanence. What exactly does that mean? Actually, it means lost of things. A few simple ones: The things that we enjoy…
In this next section I’ll share a few more stories from the “early days”(up till around June 2013). Some of these precede the Killing the Crazy story, but cover topics aside from paranoia, many are from the months shortly following that story (which occurred late 2012 or early 2013). The main point here is that as my anxiety levels began to diminish, I was able to ‘work the program’ and consider a broader array of topics through the lenses of…
I had a mole that my doctor said needed removal, only I had to wait a few weeks before I could get back in for an appointment. During that time, I panicked and contemplated, panicked and contemplated, panicked and contemplated. I’ll spare you guys the full panic details (do I have skin cancer? Am I dying? Again? I was just dying of something else last week…) and share a bit of the contemplations because they ended-up being the thoughts…
I was strolling around one of those poppy art galleries in the Mission and there was an exhibit composed entirely of quotes on the wall. Front and center was 1 line of text that really struck a chord in my heart – “I am always afraid my umbrella will get wet.” Immediately my mind started racing, after all, what’s the purpose, the nature, of an umbrella, it’s something that gets wet. Being afraid of that is just crazy right? But…
I am a real globe trotter, I travel almost every chance I get. In just the last few years I have been to Kenya, China, India, Italy, Iceland, France, Japan… So, it might come as surprise to y’all that I really don’t like flying at all, in the past I was down right terrified. No, it never really stopped me from getting on a plane, I love to travel after all, but I did manage to worry the whole flight…
The reason I chose this story to share is it uses one of my all-time favorite contemplation methods. The method comes directly from a teaching Luang Por Thoon gave to a man named Singh that quickly led to his enlightenment. The method is essentially asking a series of questions about objects we ‘own’ in order to better understand the nature of the objects (impermanent) and our relationship with those objects (also impermanent) and, in the process, to weaken our attachment…
My cell phone died. I dropped it on the street and when I picked it up I couldn’t get it to start again. It was an older model, had served me well for a few years. I knew it would be a pain to replace (have you ever been to a Verizon store?), it would take time to reload it with all my aps, with the cute icons and live wallpapers that made the thing ‘mine’, but it was alright,…
OK a little warning: This post is a little more technical/boringly written in an effort to more clearly show the structure of my thinking. However, it does deal well with the key cause (wrong view) of fears and phobias –the crazy belief that what has happened to in the past/what we imagine is an indicator of what will happen in the future. Spoiler alert: it’s not, too much changes, all the time… So anyway, if you can stay awake, it…
For me, one of the most empowering aspects of the Dharma approach taught by Luang Por Thoon’s students is the use of methods, tools, to structure my practice. Though I incorporate many different tools into my contemplations (I will call-out a few special ones in some of these blogs), there has been one in particular that has supported almost all of my contemplations — this method, which I will outline here, was adopted from what I understood from a teaching…
I had a very dear friend, we’ll call her Sue, who was quite overweight (FYI I got Sue’s permission before writing this). Try as I might, nothing I did could convince her to drop the pounds. I invited her to exercise classes with me, insisted we eat only healthy foods together, I nagged and pestered, but to no avail. I worried constantly about Sue since she is a friend that I love and depend on in my life; I was…
So If you will bear with another prelude…when I first came to this practice I suffered from extreme, almost crippling anxiety. I was afraid of almost everything, though disease, death, injury and abandonment certainly topped my list. It quickly became clear that without addressing my fear and the views that underlay it, I just wasn’t going to get anywhere. After all..extreme anxiety is not exactly a clear headed place from which to contemplate. Looking back now however, I can see how much…
I was a few days into my first KPY retreat and I was still on the fence about whether or not this approach was for me. I had quietly listened as other folks shared stories from their lives and the realizations they had achieved when they examined their experiences from a correct viewpoint. I still don’t know what persuaded me to finally speak. But I did. I raised my hand and tearfully shared a story that had caused me a…
So, Neecha and Phra Anan actually asked me to start this blog years ago (2011). At first I said yes (because who wants to disappoint their teachers?) but then…on second thought…no. Neecha told me, “We just get so excited about your practice because it progresses naturally and your examples are so clear that we want others to see how it can be done”. But honestly, I just didn’t think I was someone worthy of writing a blog about Buddhism. I…
